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Morning came with the harsh blare of the wake-up alarm, dragging us into another cycle of forced proximity, and we moved through it in a choreographed dance of avoidance. I brushed my teeth while he waited by the door, studying his fingernails. I pulled on my uniform while he stared at the wall, refusing to acknowledge the friction of fabric against skin. This was two bodies negotiating three feet of floor with everything except language.

I sat on the edge of my bed to lace my cleats. My gear was spread out on the floor, encroaching on the narrow walkway between us, because the room was too small for two egos this size.

“Move your gear.”

The command cut through the quiet. Felix stood over me, fully dressed, platinum hair perfect, collar pulled high to hide the bruise that was now turning a sickly shade of yellow-green. He looked down at me with the same stare he wore for the cameras, as if he thought I had forgotten the sound he made when I had him pinned against the wall.

I continued looping the laces through the eyelets. Left over right. Pull tight.

“I said move it, Regillen. You’re in my space.”

I finished the left shoe and started on the right, acting as if he were a hallucination, a glitch in the audio feed I could simply tune out. Three days of perfect silence, and the first words he broke it for were an order about floor space.

I stood, stepped over my bag to grab my datapad, and walked past him without breaking stride, my shoulder brushing his just enough to acknowledge he was solid matter, not enough to acknowledge he was human.

Behind me, a sharp intake of breath. The silence rushed back in, louder than any shout could have been, because he had wanted a fight. He had wanted a reaction to prove he still existed in this room, and I gave him nothing.

We carried that silence out into the corridor and down the long, sterile walk to the training ground. The thin air in the Colosseum made a different kind of hell, every breath a negotiation, and my ankle filed its morning complaint under the tape, a low ache with a pulse in it. I let it complain and kept walking. It would be back tomorrow, and the day after. It had moved in.

We were forced to play together because the Crucible protocols demanded it. We ran the perimeter, shoulder to shoulder, but miles apart.

“Pass!” Felix screamed, cutting into the channel.

I had the ball and I saw the open lane. The old instinct, the one that wanted to win, told me to send it clean. The new one, the one with his betrayal still lodged in it, wanted to drive the ball into the stands.

I compromised by drilling the pass at him, hard. It rocketed off the turf, coming in hot at waist height, a sloppy pass that should have been impossible to control. Let him wear it in the ribs. Let the drones log the Prototype fumbling something ugly for once.

Felix trapped it anyway, killing the momentum instantly, and he did not even look at me as he turned and fired it into the top corner of the net. The finish was so clean it was insulting. I had sent him a punishment, and he had played it as a pass.

“Good line,” Coach Gallus barked. “Regillen, nice pace. Cento, clean finish.”

Nice pace. That was the Academy in two words. You could load a ball with everything you wanted to break in a man, and the record called it chemistry.

We jogged back to the center circle. Felix adjusted his captain’s armband and stared straight ahead.

I watched the other pairs while we waited on the reset. Sylla and his partner were laughing, shoving each other after a goal. The defenders were gripping forearms. Even Anatol was joking with his line, building a wall of loyalty around himself one grin at a time.

Felix stood alone.

The other Tier 1s respected him, but they did not like him. They gave him space, orbiting him like planets afraid of getting burned by the sun. When he reached for water, no one offered him a bottle. When he checked his stats, no one looked over his shoulder. He was not a leader. He was an idol, frozen on a pedestal too high for anyone to reach.

I wiped the sweat out of my eyes. He thought he was above us. From down here, he just looked stranded.

The session ground to a halt when the evening shift ended, and the dread of going back to the dorm settled into my gut like bad rations. We walked back in silence, showered in separate shifts, retreated to the box. The suffocating silence followed us in.

I sat on the floor to tape my ankles, working the strips from arch to shin, and the right one complained on schedule, a hot wire under the wrapping where the gel was still rebuilding. I welcomed the complaint. Pain I knew how to deal with.

Felix walked the length of the room, turned, walked back. The rhythm was maddening. He kept drifting closer to my side, his presence a constant, itching heat against my skin, and I tracked him without lifting my head.

He passed me again, his sleep pants brushing my shoulder.

The scent hit me. Citrus soap and the underlying warmth of his skin.

The memory of the tunnel was a phantom limb. I could still feel the weight of him against the wall, the way he unraveled when I touched him. I hated him for the betrayal on the field, but my body remembered the surrender, and the proximity was dangerous because it blurred the line between wanting to strangle him and wanting to finish what I started.

He passed me again. Closer.

I needed a wall.